this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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I'm not reading through that entire article (which is just Twitter discourse in article form), but honestly, that question itself seems badly posed.
Obviously, socialists aren't going to introduce a policy like "No more bananas" or "We must have bananas at any costs". In a country where bananas don't grow, availability of bananas will depend on desire to import bananas, and another country being willing to sell you bananas. I vaguely remember something about bananas being rare in the GDR because there were few friendly countries that grew bananas (though that might have been an anti-communist source, or plain made up, I don't know, but it doesn't sound too unrealistic). Availability of bananas will depend on the circumstances you're building socialism under.
From that article:
I have no idea what this discourse is, but this line bothers me so much. Imagine caring about "American consumer's preferences". This is so stupid. If socialism ever somehow manages to take power in the USA, they really must work on changing societal attitude. US society, its values, its ways of thought reflect the worst that capitalism and imperialism have to offer. Socialism cannot succeed if these ways of thought go unaddressed. And whatever bullshit led to "I am consoomer and I am owed banana" is one of the things that have to go.
Similarly, we shouldn’t just ban meat, but have its price reflect its environmental impact so that can be dealt with and reduced rather than externalized like the profit motive would dictate. It’s absurd and unnatural for corn and beef to be so cheap and subsidized in the US. It’s far more reasonable for a burger to be $50 like in Venezuela than $5 in the US.
But this shouldn’t then apply only meat. Items like almonds and alfalfa should also reflect their absurd environmental impact and detriment to the world.
Makes sense, though that could also be mitigated through a consumption tax rather then a direct price increase. A price increase would just go straight to the producer.
True, as such it’s only natural for it to be more economical rather than less to buy local. Only a fossil fuel addicted world can find outsourcing and externalizing more “efficient” and profitable.
I was referring mostly to how those plants require absurd and absolutely unsustainable amounts of water and nutrients. They shouldn’t even be grown locally, they should not be grown at all or made extraordinary expensive to reflect their cost.
That too, for many places with “nutrient poor” soil it’s unnatural and unhealthy to have great amounts of nitrogen, thus fertilizer ends up being bad overall, and only non-native plants are grown further harming native ecology. Don’t grow water loving plants in a dry place, nor graze cows where forest is better and ruminants haven’t evolved with the soil. In addition it’s absurd that great fleets of honey bees are driven across the country for almonds, when honey bees aren’t even native anyway. Then the media starts crying they’re gonna go extinct but don’t give a shit about native pollinators.
Same with gas powered cars, over time it’ll become to expensive to fill up your car and people will switch to a cheaper alternative